Director Sara Blecher says the film’s main theme is a methaphor for SA, writes Theresa Smith
IN A key moment in the film Ayanda, actress Fulu Mugovhani looks at a picture of her character’s mother, played by Nthathi Moshesh, standing next to Kenneth Nkosi, who plays her uncle.
Director Sara Blecher had asked Moshesh for pictures of herself as a young woman and she happened to have this particular picture which became a focal point of the film’s storyline.
“It was such a weird experience, finding those pictures,” said Blecher in a phone interview from Joburg.
Photographs form a big part of the story since this is how the Ayanda character sees into the past and learns the truth about her parents, when she is ready to see it.
Ayanda is framed around a documentary filmmaker interviewing people to paint a portrait of the modern African city.
“Audiences are tired of the same old African story of misery, poverty and HIV/Aids. That’s not all Africa is about. I wanted to focus on Yeoville in particular, so the photographer gets to unpack who we are as a modern African city,” explained Blecher.
This macro picture is the film’s backbone while Ayanda’s story is the micro, personal thread the audience can identify with.
Ayanda likes upscaling old furniture and tries to revive her father’s ailing garage business by restoring vintage cars, but that’s just the sequence of events. The film is really about how she insists on preserving the past – the memory of her dead father – at the cost of moving forward into the future.
For Blecher, the key the story revolves around is: “The idea that you have to go back and look at the traumatic events in your past, unpack them and understand what was true about them in order to move forward.
“The death of the father was a traumatic experience for the family, so it’s only when she (Ayanda) learns the truth and revisits the event that she is free to move forward. They are all freed by learning the truth.
“In a way, it’s a metaphor for the country. It is a big part of the intention of the film.
“We have to look back at our trauma, as a nation developing into the future. If we don’t look back at the trauma of our past, at what happened, how do we go forward?”
Blecher is passionate about the idea that film in particular, as opposed to television, can present possibilities, ideas and thoughts that are beyond what most people can imagine: “In a cinema, you enter that world the filmmaker has made for you and you become the characters. So when you leave the cinema, you think you can do those things.
I see that as the most exciting part of what I do.”
I can practically hear her rolling her eyes down the phone when I ask how she – the older white, Durban-born woman interested in surfing – tells the story of the younger, black hipster from Joburg.
“There’s the human experience and you try to be true to that and open to people whose lives it is you are telling. You let them speak for themselves. You research. You investigate.
“The identity of the country is huge and complicated and no one person can speak to it.
“You speak about the parts you are interested in, or know about.
“The question is strange to me. If people can only make films about who they are, how do you get multiple characters in a film? And who gets to tell the alien stories?” she asked.
She has been asked this many times, but only by South African journalists.
The film Ayanda (and before that her 2011 film, Otelo Burning) has travelled the world film festival circuit and
the question she gets overseas is: “What were you intending to do with the film?” followed by lot of comments along the lines of: “We’ve never seen a person like this in a film about South Africa.”
Blecher was determined to create an atypical screen character, familiar to South African audiences because it is real, but not one often seen on screen – she makes mistakes and isn’t sure of her place in the world, but has big dreams.
“Juno for me was such an important film – it allowed my daughter to imagine the possibilities of who she could be in the world. I wanted to create a unique character like that, one who is rare in South African film in that she doesn’t trade in looks or sex. That’s not what she’s about. She is all about her creativity.
“I wanted to create this character so someone could see her and say, ‘there are other possibilities in my life’,” says Blecher.
Ayanda opens on the South African circuit on October 2